The Diptyque Sound
Contents
The striking thing about magnetostats, is the ease with which they play. Everything seems so “normal. The same is true of these Diptyques. Your author believes that this is due to the phase correctness of a panel speaker. The bass and mids come from one ‘source’ or foil in this case. And in the case of the DP107, the high frequencies come from a separate ribbon that is at equal depth with only a simple, 1st order filter in between. In short: the setup is dead simple. And that makes it pretty purist. (Positively meant).
Now, as mentioned, the Diptyque DP107 plays very easily. However, we do have to turn the volume up quite a bit when we want to have some serious volumes. And that happens quickly when we get excited. When we have two guests in our room and play some tracks, we see that the Pass Labs X150.8 has to work hard. But well: the power is stable and the DP107 can take quite a beating, it seems. “What a bass! Is that coming from those speakers? Is there really no sub somewhere?” They ask. Now there is a subwoofer in the room, but it is on the other side of the listening room and is intended for the cinema … in short: no… no sub! The guest is right: there is strikingly much low frequencies coming from these Diptyques.
The bass goes down to about 40 Hz which is fine for 90% of genres. In most music, more isn’t needed. If you really want punch and extreme bass extension, you can always add a subwoofer of course. Or buy a larger model. The DP160 goes down to 30 Hz. That should be sufficient, we estimate. However, you then have a 1.6m high speaker in the room. We do estimate that this will play very well… We have – if we remember correctly – once heard the DP140…. and it played impressively coherent and complete.
Rich and generous
Now we’ve played a lot of music over this pair of Diptyque DP107. With various amplifiers and dac combinations. This is because we were also in the process of tuning the new reference system at the time of this review. The Diptyque proved to be a good partner in tuning. The speaker is transparent, not ultra-critical when it comes to amplifiers – just choose a model with sufficient power and stability – and turns out to have a wonderfully generous and rich character. This without being too colored. We would classify it towards a touch of warm. Pleasantly warm. This makes it that almost all music sounds nice. Although at this level it will remain a case of: ‘crap in, crap out’. If music is mixed to the point of a ‘sausage wavefrom’, it is of course still audible that someone behind the controls does not understand his trade.
However, sharp edges will not come through this Diptyque excessively loud. And that is nice in a normal living room where someone just wants to listen to music and is not busy overanalyzing the layering of a certain song, or busy mastering 24/7.
The stereo image is very spacious when the set is properly positioned. This applies to all magnetostats and electrostats. Placement of bipolar models is more critical because of the reflection behavior of the speaker. But if it’s set up right… wonderful! This is – yes, it sounds contradictory – also thanks to the bipolar system. And the tilt that the foot makes possible. That is really a useful feature. We do not see this foot on the DP140 and above. Unfortunately, although it could be that at that height it is just not necessary anymore.